I knew of dykes before I knew the word. As an 11-year-old Girl Scout summer camper, I was introduced to a new type of woman. The counselors in charge of us were college-age or slightly older for those attempting to hold on a little longer to carefree summers removed from the real world. Of course, there were also gender-conforming, mainstream-looking coeds too, but there was a large population of other women. Today these people have a multitude of words to choose from, but back when I was growing up, dyke was a catchall.
Many of them wore their hair violently short, some fully buzzed. Their rail-thin to jacked bodies swaggered. Some wore backward baseball hats or bandanas, tank tops, or board shorts with literal carabiners hooked onto their belt loops. None of them talked to us about their sexuality, so more than an association with dating or sex, it was an education in the various ways a “woman” could be.
One summer, after a three-day hike on the Appalachian Trail, we stopped off at a Taco Bell where a dyke counselor accidentally ingested ground beef. A long-time vegetarian, she cried for the remaining hour ride back to camp. I wished I cared about anything as much as she cared about the well-being of animals.
At fireside jams the dykes belted The Cranberries, Sheryl Crow, and Madonna. Their laughter howled like wolves. Their farts and burps bellowed. They encouraged us to climb, play with fire, and scream at the moon. The dykes were unladylike in the most intoxicating way. It was beautiful to bask amongst them.
At an archery practice, I watched a girl twist her ankle and collapse to the ground crying. Out of nowhere, a dyke counselor sprinted across the field, lifted her, and ran to the nurses’ station faster than the golf cart could drive down to get her. Never in my life had I felt safer than being around the dykes. I wonder if their brashness existed outside the refuge of our forest.
The mainstream boogeyman words associated with dykes—scary, ugly, violent, dirty feminists—never crossed my mind as a preteen. But sometime by high school these negative stereotypes seeped into my psyche. By junior year I knew “dyke” was the worst thing you could call another girl—worse than “slut,” “whore,” or even “fat” (which in 2004 was a close second). Dyke was a word to indicate a person was subhuman—certainly sub-girl. By graduation I wondered why lesbians couldn’t all be girly. Did they really need to be boyish and call all that attention to themselves? I was terrified of butch women. And, of course, secretly turned on by them.
I left for college ready to explore my sexuality equipped only with one secret lesbian date and the first four seasons of The L Word. While I was anxious to practice drunk-kissing my friends, I stayed on high alert knowing a label of “dyke” was to be avoided.
In college I went from girls who kissed me to garner the attention of boys to one girl who kissed me because we had fallen maddeningly, albeit secretly, in love. An energy I’d never experienced, like being struck by lightning and gaining superpowers instead of dying, radiated through me. After I crawled out of the closet at 22 with minimal fanfare and a few “Yeah we figured’s,” I continued to maintain my distance from the word. I internalized dyke as a slur and didn’t want to be associated with it.
But approximately a decade after coming out of the closet and four months into the pandemic, I, like many others, experienced a tectonic shift. Maybe this was spurred by living in Brooklyn during the summer of 2020—surrounded by marches and protests, standing on my balcony with a baby on my hip banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m., cooking for our local food bank, and observing community in action for the first time, all while feeling the world could be coming to end—but a rooted sense of self shook loose.
Like the rest of the world, I relished any comfort I could latch onto, and in that moment, it surprisingly came from referring to myself as a dyke. Maybe it was seeing old ways of being thrown out the window, or more likely witnessing how broken and problematic they were. Dyke had always been there, conjuring the scent of evergreens, the sensation of the warm sun, a boost of grit, and a portal to a legacy of community builders and activists. I had turned my back on it, but finally, I recognized its shelter as a connector to the past and the ability to carry us together into the future.
Images Courtesy Of Samantha Mann
